Excursions with Poet Larry Levis

If you haven't taken an adventure with the poet Larry Levis, I'd like to share his poem "Lost Fan, Hotel Californian, Fresno, 1923" (53-54) and recommend his book The Dollmaker’s Ghost.

I love where this poem takes me. And where, you might ask, is that? To a variety of visual and, yes, sensory excursions. As Levis unravels his infinite imagination, the poem's "looking glass" seems to fluctuate between a magnified lens and a telescope in a series of miniature vignettes. The effect is dreamlike. Each literary sketch melts into the blossom of the next:

      In Fresno, it is 1923, and your shy father
      Has picked up a Chinese fan abandoned
      Among the corsages crushed into the dance floor.
      On it, a man with scrolls is crossing a rope bridge
      Over gradually whitening water.
      If you look closely you can see brush strokes intended
      To be trout.
      You can see that the whole scene
      Is centuries older
      Than the hotel, or Fresno in the hard glare of morning.
      And the girl
      Who used this fan to cover her mouth
      Or her breasts under the cool brilliance
      Of chandeliers
      Is gone on a train sliding along tracks that are
      Pitted with rust. (1-16)

In these first sixteen lines, we've ventured to three different locations by the way of a simple motif: the Chinese fan. As the poem dilates and expands, we take several excursions along its narrative—riding through entertaining and associative images, traveling from one cinematic frame to the next, and gathering emotional and intellectual momentum along the way. Read this great poem, and see what comes up next. The price of the book The Dollmaker's Ghost is worth every penny considering the many excursions you’ll take in the poems of Larry Levis.

(Jensea Storie, Poetry Editor)